I was suffering the same System confusion as everybody is now, and Ron you said to me: Vincent, System is just what you were ranting about. And I said, oh!

What you said precisely is: System is the Lumpley Principle in action. By "the Lumpley Principle" here you meant the principle that nothing happens in the game until everybody agrees that it does, my rant.

So "the Lumpley Principle" became shorthand for "System is the process ('in action') by which the players come to agreement about what happens in play."

I think we should press on, boldly. System means the actual process in actual play, the Lumpley Principle remains the Lumpley Principle we know and love, not whatever its roots once were. I surely didn't mean to be confusing.

No, it's what I described to Mike on the previous page: more attention and effort. It takes work to apply System when you play GURPS, in order to find and apply various modifiers. It also takes work to do it in most so-called System-less (i.e. Drama-mechanics) games, in order to negotiate where the buck stops this time.

As a related point, none of this has anything to do with what people call "System-heavy" or "System-light." It has a lot to do with what I used to call Vanilla vs. Pervy, but now gets discussed as "Points of Contact." The whole issue is whether the System itself becomes a subject of attention. Think in real-people terms of attention, discussion, usage, and stuff like Search and Handling Times.

I suggest that yes/no on this issue is not a matter of good or bad, but rather is very significant for any mode of play. Thus, one may see Vanilla Gamist play or a wide variety of Pervy Gamist play; Vanilla Sim play or a wide variety of Pervy Sim play; Vanilla Narrativist play or a wide variety of Pervy Narrativist play.

To repeat some of my earlier points about that, "Vanilla" of one mode does not resemble and represents no sort of combination with any other mode. Some people in the past thought I meant Sim/Narr hybrid by Vanilla, but they were very mistaken.

Sometimes, a whole heck of a lot. Debate the likelihood of a lone orc in the underbrush way out here, make a having-an-orc-show-up roll, a having-an-orc-hide-in-the-underbrush roll, a having-the-orc-jump-out roll, argue about the modifiers for each of the rolls, get into a philosophical thing about the rules' modeling of orc-jump-out likelihood... That's a whole boatload of Exploration of System.

In all of Vincent's examples, though, the change in the world state (the addition or repositioning of the orc) is the same.

So "system as the causation of change in the imagined space" is equally manifest in all those cases.

While "system having attention paid to it and being explored" varies depending on points of contact.

So we're still dealing with different shades of meaning of "system," (we can also throw in system-as-abstract-set-of-rules), which has been the problem all along, but we can work around it. This all makes sense if exploration of system is "attention and effort applied to points of contact." Time and motion in the examined space is driven by system, but that process does not necessarily have exploration of system in the forefront because the system may or may not have high density of points of contact.

Silly but actually apt physics analogy: the difference between heat and temperature can be confusing. The key is understanding heat capacity, which is the ratio between the two. Heat capacity varies between different materials. "Heat" is system-in-action, "temperature" is exploration of system in play, "Heat capacity" is (density of) points of contact, a characteristic of the play heavily influenced by the system-as-abstract-set-of-rules.